Memory Trace
by cursetheflame
Summary: In every story, there is a hero and a villain. In Kagome’s tale, she was the heroine. Who, then, was the villain? For, as every child knows, a fairy tale must have its villain.


**Title:** Memory Trace

**Summary:** In every story, there is a hero and a villain. In Kagome's tale, she was the heroine. Who, then, was the villain? For, as every child knows, a fairy tale must have its villain.

**Disclaimer:** I don't own any of the Inu-tachi; that honor belongs to Rumiko Takahashi. I can pretend, though, right?

**Theme:** This is a one-shot written for the iyfic contest community at livejournal; the theme was villain and it won first prize :)"

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It was the one day a year that she allowed herself to revel in the past, relive the memories that haunted her dreams and kept her from her sleep. If her family understood her distress at this particular date, they said nothing. Instead, they turned their heads as she made up a lame excuse before reaching in the kitchen drawer, pulling out the worn book. She held the book close to her chest and made her way out the back door. They never even noticed her escape.

She shuffled across the yard, her eyes stayed to their course. From the countless treks made to the old well-house her feet knew every step. Her hands reached out for the door, recognizing the familiar feel of the wood. She sighed, and slipped inside.

Slowly, she pulled the door shut behind her. It was on this day that she craved the silence, needed the loneliness.

She faced the well – the cursed well – and sat down on the step. If only she had known then what had laid waiting at the foot of these very steps, all those years ago?

A trace of a memory crossed her face. Her lips curled upwards, a ghost of the smile she once wore. She found comfort in the musty scent that accompanied the well-house, dank and damp from years of non-use.

Feeling as though the past was settling down around her, she pulled out the old book and read the first page:

_My name is Higurashi Kagome and a funny thing happened on the morning of my fifteenth birthday: I became the heroine of a feudal fairy tale…_

If Kagome was the heroine, who was the villain? For, as every child knows, a fairy tale must have its villain.

She looked upon the first character introduced in the journal's tale: _Inuyasha_. If she had put the book down then, having read no more pages thereafter, the answer would have been found. Having mistaken her for the priestess who had sealed him fifty years prior, Inuyasha had attacked Kagome shortly after she broke the spell. But, if she had forsaken the opportunity to read on about such an adventure, she would not have seen how the pair had grown to tolerate and, later, love one another. If Kagome was the heroine in the tale, Inuyasha had been her hero.

Was the lecherous monk the villain then? _Miroku_? The womanizer took every opportunity to find a woman eager to bear his children in order to continue his family line. Though he had attempted to kidnap Kagome in order to steal her jewel shards when they met, it was not out of spite nor greed – it was out of necessity. He desired to collect the shards that she and Inuyasha were already after in order to chase out his own enemy. Due to a curse that threatened his own life, Miroku thereafter joined in on the pair's adventures to search out the youkai responsible for the kazaana in his hand.

Might it have been the youkai exterminator mentioned not long after the monk? _Sango_? Having been manipulated to believe that Inuyasha had been the youkai behind her village's decimation, the taijiya aimed to kill the hanyou. Neither perished in the battle, and became all the stronger for the fight. Sango was invited to join their fledgling pack, becoming the sister Kagome always needed, the fighter Inuyasha admired, the woman Miroku desired.

They, including the fox kitsune, Shippo, were her friends – her newfound family. The ones who protected her and loved her in turn. The ones that enabled her to return to the past, and battle on. The ones that helped her to seek out their villain.

Flipping through the pages, pages worn with innumerable reads, she caught sight of familiar names: _Kagura, Kanna, Goshinki, Muso, Akago, Moryomaru_… The list grew on, each entry in the diary carrying the name of another villain in the adventure. Long ago, she came to regard these names as the wrong-doers, versus the good characters of the story. But she knew, beyond them all, that the strongest villain of them all was a human-demon hybrid called Naraku. It was, in fact, such a hanyou that spawned the numerous detachments mentioned throughout the journal.

_Naraku_. From the first mention of the demon-consumed bandit, one could almost feel the hatred and despair underlying the characters of his name. It was he who orchestrated the betrayal between Inuyasha and the miko, Kikyo, fifty years before she had met the hanyou. It was he who cursed Miroku's family line with the kazaana and urged the monk to find a carrier for his child before said line dies out. It was he who slaughtered Sango's entire village before using her younger brother as a puppet to carry out his wishes.

Everything bad that happened to them all had happened because of Naraku. Surely, then, it was he who was the mighty antagonist of the tale.

She closed the book, sighing with a sense of finality. The book had never been finished, instead left behind for a poor, distraught mother to find. It was in her own sweet way that Kagome was able to tell her mother of her adventures in the past when she could not do so herself. Without meaning to – or maybe that was her intention all the while – Kagome lent some sort of closure for her mother.

However, the abruptness of the close of her entries was enough to nearly drive her mother mad with grief – how had the fairy tale ended? But, it was only on this certain day that she gave into her worries and tried to imagine a happy ending to her daughter's adventure. Every year, on the day the adventure began, the day the adventure ceased, the day of Kagome's birth, she re-read her daughter's old journal, trying to find solace in the words penned so long ago. Yet, every year, she only arrived upon a single conclusion.

Who exactly was the great villain in Kagome's feudal fairy tale? To Higurashi Aki, it wasn't a who – it was a what.

The greatest villain in her daughter's adventures? It was the well...

It was the ancient well that drew her daughter into the past countless times. The well that tore from her the normal life she knew, keeping her from her family and friends in the present time. The well that ultimately neglected to bring Kagome back home.

It all came down to that damned well...


End file.
